Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood

# The Muslim Brotherhood: Islam's Most Influential Modern Movement

A Teacher in Ismailia

In March 1928 CE (Dhul Qa'da 1346 AH), Hassan al-Banna — a 22-year-old schoolteacher newly arrived in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia — gathered six workers from the Suez Canal Company in a modest meeting and proposed the formation of a new organization. The organization they founded that day — Jamiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the Society of the Muslim Brothers — would become the most influential and most contested Islamic organization of the 20th century, with branches across the Arab world and beyond.

Al-Banna was born in 1324 AH / 1906 CE in Mahmudiyya, a small town in the Egyptian Delta, the son of a watchmaker and amateur hadith scholar who transmitted to his son both a love of craft and a love of Islamic knowledge. By his own account, al-Banna was deeply religious from childhood — memorizing the Quran, participating in Sufi dhikr circles, and organizing youth for moral reform even before he completed his education. He graduated from Dar al-Ulum (the teachers' college in Cairo) in 1927 and was assigned a teaching post in Ismailia.

Ismailia was not chosen randomly by history. It was the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company — a private company whose capital was British and French, whose management was European, and whose facilities (private clubs, swimming pools, European-style buildings) were reserved for foreign employees. Egyptian and Arab workers lived in different, inferior conditions. The contrast between the gleaming European quarter and the impoverished Egyptian neighborhoods was a daily reminder of colonial inequality.

The Context: A World of Crisis

Four years before al-Banna's founding meeting, the Ottoman Caliphate had been abolished (March 1924). The Muslim world that al-Banna grew up in was one shaped by this traumatic loss — the symbolic center of Muslim unity gone, European powers controlling Muslim lands from Morocco to Indonesia, the educated elite of Muslim countries increasingly adopting Western dress, language, and secularist ideology.

In Egypt, this cultural tension was acute. King Fuad's government was formally independent but substantially under British influence; British troops remained in the Canal Zone; the Egyptian economy was largely controlled by foreign capital; and among the educated urban class, a growing tendency toward secular nationalism and Western cultural models was alarming traditional Muslims.

The intellectual atmosphere had been shaped by the debate between Westernizing reformers (who argued Muslims must adopt Western science, technology, and governance) and traditionalists (who resisted wholesale Westernization). Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh had proposed a middle way — modernist Islamic reform — but their legacy was contested. Rashid Rida's al-Manar journal had been publishing since 1898, calling for reform grounded in Quran and authentic Sunnah.

Al-Banna synthesized these currents into a simple, powerful message: Islam is not merely a religion (din) confined to mosques and private practice — it is a comprehensive system (nizam shamil) covering every aspect of human life: individual worship, family organization, economic activity, social welfare, and political governance. The slogan that became the Brotherhood's most famous: "Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our constitution; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our highest aspiration."

Organization and Growth

What distinguished the Muslim Brotherhood from previous Islamic intellectual movements was its organizational sophistication. Al-Banna was not merely a writer and lecturer — he was a brilliant organizer who understood that ideas require institutions.

The Brotherhood was organized into cells (usar, "families"), each of ten members, who met weekly for study, physical training, and practical projects. Cells were grouped into larger units up to the national level. Every member was expected to contribute financially, recruit new members, and participate actively in the organization's activities.

The activities themselves were comprehensive and practical: the Brotherhood established schools, clinics, and hospitals in areas where the government provided none. It built mosques and Islamic centers. It organized welfare programs for the poor. This combination of spiritual formation, intellectual education, social service, and political engagement gave the Brotherhood a presence in Egyptian society that no purely political party could match.

By the early 1940s, the Brotherhood had grown from six members to an estimated 500,000 members and twice that number of sympathizers. Al-Banna traveled constantly across Egypt, speaking in markets, mosques, coffee houses, and village squares — a style of grassroots organizing that was new in the context of Islamic reform movements.

Theological Positions

The Muslim Brotherhood's theology was — and remains — mainstream Sunni Islam, though it occupied a distinctive position within Sunni diversity.

Al-Banna and the early Brotherhood were not Salafi in the narrow sense — they did not share the Arabian Wahhabi movement's rejection of all Sufi practice and its insistence on following only explicitly authenticated hadith. Al-Banna himself had Sufi affiliations (he was a member of the Hasafiyya Sufi order in his youth). The Brotherhood's early legal pluralism — accepting all four major Sunni legal schools — was explicitly intended to unite rather than divide Muslims.

At the same time, the Brotherhood was influenced by the Salafi dimension of the reform tradition: emphasis on returning to Quran and authentic Sunnah, rejection of innovations (bid'ah) that had no foundation in the primary sources, and insistence that the scholars of the first three generations (the Salaf al-Salih) provided the most reliable guide to Islamic practice.

The Brotherhood's distinctive contribution was political Islam: the argument that Islam requires Muslims to engage with and transform political life, not merely govern their private practice. This was not an innovation — classical Islamic political thought had always acknowledged the necessity of Islamic governance. But al-Banna's achievement was to articulate this traditional position in a form accessible to ordinary educated Muslims in the 20th century and to build an organization capable of acting on it.

The Violence Controversy and al-Banna's Assassination

The Brotherhood's relationship with political violence is complex and requires careful historical treatment.

In the late 1940s, the Brotherhood's "Special Apparatus" (al-Jihaz al-Sirri) was involved in political violence — bombings and assassinations. The historical record shows al-Banna knew of the Special Apparatus's existence but repeatedly condemned uncoordinated individual acts of violence that went beyond his control. His public position was consistently that gradual Islamization of society through education and social work — not violence — was the path to Islamic governance.

The Egyptian government used political violence (including a bombing attributed to the Special Apparatus in 1948) as a pretext to dissolve the Brotherhood in December 1948. Then, in February 1949, al-Banna was shot and killed by Egyptian government agents on a Cairo street. He was 43 years old.

His assassination was experienced by his followers as a martyrdom. His funeral was attended by huge crowds. The government that ordered his assassination — the monarchy closely aligned with British interests — was itself overthrown by the Free Officers' Revolution in 1952, led by some officers who had earlier had Brotherhood sympathies.

Sayyid Qutb and the Radicalization

The most consequential development in Brotherhood history after al-Banna's assassination was the ideological radicalization associated with Sayyid Qutb (1325-1386 AH / 1906-1966 CE).

Qutb had been a literary critic and education official with nationalist sympathies before joining the Brotherhood in the early 1950s. His arrest in 1954 by Nasser's government — along with thousands of other Brotherhood members — and his subsequent torture and lengthy imprisonment transformed him. In prison, he wrote Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones, published 1964), the most influential radical Islamic text of the 20th century.

The book's key argument: contemporary Muslim societies, including those that called themselves Muslim, were in a state of Jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic ignorance of Arabia) because they did not govern themselves by God's law. Authentic Islam required a vanguard of committed Muslims to separate from this Jahiliyya and work to overthrow it.

The radical implications were clear to Nasser's government, which had Qutb executed in August 1966. But Milestones circulated widely and provided the ideological foundation for subsequent militant Islamic movements — from Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which assassinated Sadat) to al-Qaeda.

The Brotherhood itself — in Egypt and in its international branches — officially rejected Qutb's extreme conclusions. They maintained al-Banna's approach of gradual societal change through legitimate means. The distinction between the mainstream Brotherhood and the Qutbist-inspired militant movements is real and important, though the Brotherhood's own inconsistency on the question of political violence over the decades has sometimes blurred it.

The Ahl us-Sunnah Assessment

Evaluating the Muslim Brotherhood from an Ahl us-Sunnah perspective requires distinguishing between different aspects of its heritage.

Al-Banna's foundational emphasis — that Islam is comprehensive, that Muslims must revive Islamic practice in every sphere of life, and that serving the poor and building Islamic institutions is a religious obligation — reflects sound Islamic principles that Ahl us-Sunnah scholars affirm.

The Brotherhood's engagement with electoral politics has generated scholarly debate. Some scholars argue that participating in democratic elections in non-Islamic systems is permissible as a lesser-evil strategy; others argue it represents unacceptable compromise with non-Islamic governance frameworks.

The Brotherhood's international dimension — spreading to Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and creating ideological affiliates across the Muslim world — means that "the Brotherhood" is not monolithic. The Tunisian Ennahda, the Palestinian Hamas, the Jordanian Islamic Action Front, and others have developed in different directions shaped by their local contexts.

Sources:

• Al-Banna, Hassan. Majmu'at Rasa'il al-Imam al-Shahid Hassan al-Banna (Collected Epistles). Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi' wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya.
• Mitchell, Richard P. The Society of the Muslim Brothers. Oxford University Press, 1969.
• Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement. Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Qutb, Sayyid. Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones). Various editions.
• Al-Banna, Hassan. Memoirs (Mudhakkirat al-Da'wa wal-Da'iya). Trans. into English as Memoirs of Hasan al-Banna Shaheed. Islamic Book Service, 1981.
• Lia, Brynjar. The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928-1942. Ithaca Press, 1998.
• Kepel, Gilles. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh. University of California Press, 1985.